The Columbia Museum of Art Hosts Skate and Create 3.0

When Dave Toole, Bluetile Skateboards Owner and POUR IT NOW volunteer, first held Skate and Create he asked the artists to re-imagine a skateboard as something new and different – the same way a skateboarder re-imagines the urban terrain into his own skateboard park. The result was fantastic, an entire gallery of skateboards repurposed and recycled as artwork. The third iteration of Skate and Create brings to The Columbia Museum of Art, the works of internationally acclaimed artists who attribute their inspiration to growing up within the skateboarding scene in South Carolina. The spirit of skateboarding is directly infused within the work of Kevin E. Taylor, Jason Filipow and the rest of the Skate and Create Artists.

Taylor writes, “our creative life was nurtured through skateboarding. Little did we know, but the act of improvising hours of fun from society’s detritus would train our minds to explore the potentiality of our surroundings. Skateboarding was a self expressive mode, in which we developed individualities and preferences. Through it and the surrounding atmosphere of counter culture, we learned the mechanics of introspection. It was something we did together, but by ourselves. We all had our distinctive styles then, just as we do now.

I remember building a ramp using found scraps of wood. For a couple of hours, we’d scoured the ground at the junkyard on Sullivan’s Island, each of us collecting an artillery of rusty, bent and nearly broken nails. With half of a broken brick, we took those and hammered them back into shape. We had learned how to design, conceptualize and construct what we saw in our heads. In 1987, we called them ramps, but now we know, they were indeed our earliest original works.”

Skate and Create began out of the necessity to build awareness and raise funds for a skateboard park in Columbia, SC. When the skatepark at Owens Field was demolished, it created an amazing opportunity for the City of Columbia to replace it with a unique structure unlike any other in South Carolina. A concrete skatepark is in essence a sculpture of massive proportions. The interaction between structure and participant becomes necessary to fully realize the potential of the piece. Thirty-year veteran skatepark designer, Wally Hollyday was commissioned for the Owens Field Skatepark project. His designs have been built all over the world. As a preview to the construction of his 16,000 square foot installation, his designs and blueprints for Owens Field Skatepark will be on display as part of the exhibit.

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